Press Statement: Malicious prank against Migrant Tales

The Migrant Tales blog was the victim of a malicious prank over the weekend by a group of users from Hommaforum, an anti-immigration forum notorious in Finland for its promotion of anti-immigration sentiment.

A story sent to us anonymously was in fact a bogus story intended to cast doubt over the integrity of Migrant Tales and the reality of racism in Finland. Such an exercise in deception will achieve neither aim.

However, it is NOT the intention of Migrant Tales to publish stories that are untrue, and it is very rare that we will publish a story that has not already had some verification via media sources, or for which we have direct contacts with the people involved or close to those involved. To an extent, as part of the new breed of citizen’s journalists commonly operating on the internet, we take stories on good faith. We are not the first to be deceived in this way and we will not be the last.

We will take care in the future to be mindful of the fact that some people are willing to go to extensive lengths to invent a story of racism simply to deceive the public in some way, but that perhaps unsurprisingly, those people were not actually immigrants in this case, but native Finns looking to use deception as a means to undermine the very real and serious understanding of racism in Finland.

There is nothing to be learned from such stunts except to say that we of course stand by the blog and we know and trust our own intentions to give a voice to REAL immigrants in Finland.

We will however be more careful with those very rare stories that come to us completely anonymously and with no other media verification. Rest assured, we do take the integrity of this site very seriously for the simple fact that those that suffer any kind of discrimination deserve to be protected from this kind of malicious manipulation of public media.